These Top Tools Will See You Never Missing A Beat!

Buffer:

This amazing application designed for the web and mobile, will let you manage your social media accounts with such ease and comfort, providing the user with the ability to schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even LinkedIn.

So no longer will you have to log into all your accounts and think for hours about what to write, you can build up your posts base and schedule them at key times for you.

Say you are wanting content to reach people in America, then with Buffer you can do just that, write your post and content then just schedule it to be posted when they are awake and working, increasing the chance of your content being seen!

Hootsuite:

Very similar to Buffer, Hootsuite with its professional easy layout allows you to manage your social medias the same way, one benefit of Hootsuite is the amount of integration you have at your finger tips, allowing you to not only post on the mains sites of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, but additionally Reddit,Tumblr,Google+ and YouTube, providing you with both Full and Lite versions of their platform for you to use.

Mail Chimp:

This tool will help you greatly with your email marketing and emails in general, allowing you to store all your contacts in a list, which then using its in built designer, you can import images and create your own custom email, their many templates helping you to create a quick professional campaign email, which then you can send out to your many contacts, making the whole business of dealing with emails, quick, clean and harmless.

Review:

Overall these tools will be a great addition to any business, but you must be aware they will not always be perfect and solve your answers, for instant MailChimp is great for email marketing, but with the new laws coming into place in the UK it could be increasing more difficult to use and self awareness will be needed when using such a tool, the others could lead you into posting very automated posts on your social medias, so don’t lose the fact that you need a human behind the wheel, otherwise you could scare off or displease your audience by bombarding them with generic boring non sticky content.

In the academic and marketing world, there is a multitude of models people have created for you to use and fall back on for guidance and inspiration with your work, this model might not always fit the bill or help 100% of the time but it sure will lead you down the right path, this top model will help you to find that inspiration and help, you might need, you might not, but its sure to help.

RACE

Reach Act Convert Engage

This model will by Smart Insights will allow you to gain some form of guidance when working with your companies online campaign, giving you clear steps for you to analyse and follow.

Starting with Reach, where you are improving awareness of yourself, either on other websites or offline, with the goal of increasing traffic to wherever you need, with the aim of increasing interactions with customers over time, using either paid for or non paid for media.

Act: One of the key stages of the model, the Act stage involves convincing visitors and customer to act on what you are trying to portray over to them, this could be seen as simple an act as signing up for a news letter or sharing/commenting on your social media posts, the main goal at this point is to get the customer or visitor interacting with you, keeping their attention on you for long periods of time.

Convert: This key role is getting the customer or visitor to take the key step of being sold to you, this step turns that individual to a paying customer, and a key turning point in your relationship with each other, take great care in not dismantling this relationship with bad sales, or bad systems, any ill- doing can lead to discontent from the customer and you may lose the sale.

Engage: This final step is all about long-term engagement from the customer, or building brand loyalty with your first time users/buyers, with using email, social media and direct interactions to achieve a strong relationship with them, and hopefully lead to repeat sales or positive feedback on social media or word of mouth.

The Digital Eco-System of Twitter

The news and social networking giant that is Twitter, has become a must for every business on the planet it seems, from the mundane small local coffee outlet to powerhouse giants like Facebook, all with their own messages and information to give.

Over the years Twitter has become one of the major players in the online scene, reaching almost Facebook levels where its almost mandatory to at least have an account.

With its addition of allowing video and higher word count, its relevance has never been so current, this is further solidified by Donald Trump and his prolific use of the site to voice his views.

The Connection:

no matter what company you are dealing with, its a given that they will have a Twitter account of some sorts for you to interact with, its either some basic information giver, sales or maybe both, the best companies in my opinion are the ones who balance these but also talking and communicate with you, they are not just a name, they are a face and personalty, having genuine conversations with customers and realistic honest answers for your questions.

As a customer you have the power against companies using Twitter, their posts and replies always open for the public eye to see, this forces the companies to be more accommodating and eager to help what your issue, so as long as your question or issue is not ridiculous, you always have the upperhand, and if they are not playing nice, you just screenshot their answer, post it up yourself, and show the world, how bad they are being, the life of a company on Twitter is a life of PR and making sure you play your cards right, so with being a customer the companies are always on the back foot.

In addition to the business side of things, Twitter as become identifiable by its use in protests, of good and bad, giving a voice to groups, and representation, and in some cases, Twitter is better at giving you current news then dedicated news sources, with the very people involved, posting their experiences online.

The Future

Its not the fastest service to change with the times, but they are, adding video, expanded word counts, among other features, Twitter has the potential to keep improving and expanding, it could try and have functions similar to YouTube, or maybe Facebook, they could even think up brand new ways to allow connectivity and creativity for its user base.

They have a large number of users and following it, and being a dominant member of the internet world, they have much more financial freedom and feedback then most, allowing for features and opportunities for themselves and user base.

What is a persona?

Fictional representations of your customer base, this is based from as much information as possible that you can find, with focuses on buying habits, viewing habits and lifestyle, all this information coming together to bring in a focused ideal customer, allowing deeper understanding of your buyer base and meaning further research and targeting can be made.

Why Persona’s?

Without creating a number of persona’s for your company, how can you hope to understand your customer base, you can only make assumptions at that point until you put in the time to use all the data you have and information out there, to create your customers, and know exactly what they are thinking and wanting.

This deeper insight given by the creation of a persona allows for you to really tailor your sales campaigns and product development, because you now know much closer what they are thinking, doing and wanting.

By knowing the problems your customer base face you can really tailor your product or service to fit with what your customer wants, additionally with knowing where your customers spend their time and which sites/social medias they visit, you can target those areas maybe with advertisements.

Furthermore creating personas allows your business to have consistency internally, with co-workers being able to reference a customer with a persona, giving you the ability to quickly ascertain which customer base you are dealing with, this can also be put into use with your sales team, who with having access to personas, knowing their customers, can be much more efficient, and improve with their sales performance, having their sales pitch really more refined and tailored towards the customer they are going to convince.

The Benefits:

Customer Insigh

Customer Wants

Customer Needs

Buying Habits

Downsides:

With all these elements, creating a persona is not full proof, and could lead to you thinking overly confidant with your knowledge of the customer base, so don’t expect having in-depth personas to be a sure fire way to increase profit margins.

Not Always Accurate

Can Lead to Overconfidence

Needs to be used in conjunction with other methods.

With all this, where do you start?

One good starting point with creating your persona’s is using the office of national statistics, this site is a very good base for you to learn about your customers, their wants, needs and habits, from here you can branch off into more in-depth research. https://www.ons.gov.uk/

Canva

Struggle to produce Infographics or want to produce nice quick visuals for a presentation?

While at university, I have had to create multiple Infographics and presentations, this software made the process at least slightly less painful, you only really need the free version and you are away, but a free trail is available, but be aware IT WILL auto renew if you forget to cancel.

Furthermore with its easy to use templates, and drag system, you can create professional looking work in no time at all, additionally with the free version you get given already a pretty good selection of images and tools to use, so as long as you keep the creative juices flowing, their simple offerings can be used to great effect.

I always struggled to find software that would help me in creating infographics, I always used powerpoint or word, just the general access software, and don’t get me wrong, powerpoint works wonders, love that piece of kit, but conva really simplified the process.

Overall, would I recommend this software for anyone wanting to dabble in infographics, I sure would, but remember to not have too much writing and mainly images to show your points, otherwise its not really a infographic then but a book or something, and no one wants to read mountains of words in a presentation.